In our continuous effort to transfer our Participatory Video expertise as a tool to improve research, engagement, impact and social change, Spectacle over the years has trained hundreds of researchers and has always tailored its training courses to the needs of our trainees. We believe that video is a tool that researchers should not feel afraid to use as a support for their documentation, data analysis and dissemination of results.
In recent years we have developed our methods in a range of projects, using remote work environments to reach out to participants in different parts of the world and adapt to circumstances when travelling is not possible or too costly.
We have evolved a hybrid model to merge the best of what we learned about in-person and remote training. In-person camera production workshops is the best setting for hands-on practical experience and to have access to professional equipment. Remote training is an efficient and cost effective way to learn and collaborate on video editing projects, allowing participants to acquire new skills from home.
We have recently been asked to design a hybrid bespoke training programme for the Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, where we have delivered a 2 day in-person Participatory Video workshop to a group of 11 researchers. Social researchers from the institute, all planning to include video in their ongoing and future projects, have learned how to use video to document and support investigations and explored the use of participatory video tools for research.
Building on our 30+ years experience in community based video and thanks to our successful experience in pioneering the use of remote participatory video we have designed a hybrid bespoke training programme in two phases.
During the first phase we have delivered a 2 day workshop: Spectacle brought to the Hutton Institute in Aberdeen our equipment, including a range of professional camera types, mics, lights, and tripods etc., to run an intensive introduction to the use of video tools.
In two days, along with demystifying the technology and learning how cameras work, we have shared tricks to work as a team, giving the opportunity to acquire hands-on experience on how to film interviews, document events and locations and approach visual storytelling in the context of research.
All attendees have really valued the way Spectacle delivered a great quantity of technical knowledge in a relatively short time, with practical exercises that are fun and illustrative of all the challenges involved in video making. The learning experience is designed so that it can be applied in any research field: assuming no prior knowledge, using transferable skills to establish a creative environment where everyone can develop new skills and feel confident that their ideas matter.
The training programme will continue on Zoom with remote video editing sessions, a tool we have successfully included in our participatory practice as well as in our training activity. We will deliver a series of short modules exploring editing softwares, workflows, tools for editing and methods to enhance editorial collaboration and participation.
All participants will be able to attend from their own computer and review in their own time the recordings of the training sessions in case they miss one. Our online participatory video editing, successfully applied in a range of projects, allows editorial control to be shared either among researchers engaged in the same project or with research participants.
If you want to learn more about our training courses and our offer, please visit our website or contact us at training@spectacle.co.uk. If you are a member of a research group and want to bring our training to your institution, we are happy to illustrate our bespoke training offer and discuss the content that best suits your needs. All our training can be entirely in person, remote or hybrid, and can include follow up tutorials, troubleshooting and project support as well as video editing support for participatory video projects and short documentary productions.
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We are very happy to present the results of a recent collaboration that Spectacle has undertaken with Luisa Enria, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, helping her produce a collaborative documentary film project built around her research on epidemic management in Sierra Leone.
In January 2022, Luisa attended one of our courses for Anthropologists and Social Researchers with no prior knowledge in video-making. In just over a year Luisa and her co-directors Abass S. Kamara, a field epidemiologist, and Mohamed Lamin Kamara, a civil society activist, set up a local video advisory group, documenting with them places, events and protagonists of the epidemic response to Ebola and the more recent epidemics, including COVID-19 and measles, in Sierra Leone.
The result was the documentary film TARMA: Communities on the Frontlines of Epidemic Response. Spectacle supported Luisa in planning, developing and editing the documentary and we are proud to share with our audience and the general public a powerful account of community response to health challenges.
TARMA: Communities on the Frontlines
In 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the world, many of us had to adapt for the first time to pandemic living, taking measures to protect ourselves and our loved ones from the virus. In countries like Sierra Leone, in West Africa, as the pandemic hit, communities already knew what to do. They had been there before. In 2014-16 Sierra Leone experienced a devastating epidemic of Ebola. Amidst immeasurable losses, across the country health workers and citizens built systems to fight future diseases and foster trust amongst the population. TARMA tells the story of how ordinary citizens and local responders, from surveillance officers and doctors to traditional healers, chiefs, and civil society activists, came together during Ebola and subsequent epidemics to develop locally led solutions.
Humanitarian organisations often say that “epidemics begin and end in communities”, however responses to health emergencies in practice remain too often very top-down and rely on one-way communication with affected citizens. This fails to recognise the knowledge and expertise that already exists at local level. Set in Sierra Leone’s Northern District of Kambia, the documentary centres on the experiences of local responders, as we hear their memories of past outbreaks and follow them into the field as they search for and respond to new diseases. TARMA foregrounds the storytelling of Kambians from different walks of life, without a voiceover narrative so as to offer a direct testimony of the lessons they have learned that might help people across the world to prepare for future emergencies.
Bringing together all the different voices involved in epidemic response, the documentary shows how dangerous it can be to ignore local knowledge and the transformative potential of local leadership in building trust in times of crisis. Collaboration is not always easy, however and ‘community’ is never homogenous or without conflict and disagreements. Through the narration of Morris Bompa, an experienced traditional healer who participated in the Ebola response, we also see the tensions involved when different ways of seeing the world collide. By highlighting these negotiations, the documentary is intended to stimulate debate and discussions around questions of power and the challenges involved in daily efforts to come together in times of crisis.
Making TARMA
Due to pandemic restrictions Spectacle has started developing a range of strategies to translate into a remote work environment its participatory video tools and practice. Supporting long term research projects as well as providing research groups with video making skills that can be used in their research, Spectacle’s approach is to find practical solutions to effectively transfer the skills needed to work together as a group on a film project. Spectacle, through remote workshops, has successfully trained and supported local groups as well as dozens of researchers who gained working skills in shooting and editing video. With Luisa, Spectacle developed a bespoke set of interventions that were tailored to her specific needs as her research and film project progressed.
After attending Spectacle’s video training course, Luisa contacted Spectacle’s team asking to support her and her collaborators, none of whom had any experience in video making, to document and story tell their experience of the recent pandemics in a documentary film that could work both locally and internationally, confronting policy makers, health workers, NGOs and local communities with first-hand accounts of what happened. The film would have also served the purpose of bringing the particular experience that Sierra Leone had to the wide international audience, attempting to highlight the complexity of local responses and the importance of collaboration to overcome the health crisis.
With Mark and Michele’s precious advice, Luisa returned to Sierra Leone in March 2022 for four months of research and filming. The initial planning for the documentary drew on the experience that Luisa, Abass and Lamin had developed working together for almost a decade of research into local experiences of health crisis and emergency response in Kambia. The three of them brought their diverse perspectives as a social scientist, a field epidemiologist and a civil society activist. They decided to establish a Community Advisory Group (CAG), which met every other week in Kambia to debate ideas for the film, including selecting people to interview, deciding on locations and key activities to film. The team wanted to capture a wide range of voices and to give a flavour of what it means to do the work of epidemic preparedness every day. They travelled far and wide across the District on motorbikes and boats, joining District vaccination campaigns and measles surveillance activities or walking deep into the forest with Morris Bompa the traditional healer.
After filming, Luisa and Sallieu Kamara, a member of the CAG with interest in filming, attended Spectacle’s Video Editing course, aiming at understanding video editing in terms of process that can, through specific workflows, be shared within a group, improving the ability to analyse material while moving forward the editorial process. Spectacle has then offered technical support in setting up the editing project, allowing Luisa to work in her own time towards a fine cut in collaboration with local partners. Working along with our Spectacle’s professional editor and anthropologist Michele de Laurentiis, and with the supervision of our director Mark Saunders, Spectacle helped Luisa and her collaborators to achieve incredible results, giving birth to an engaging and informative film that has already been shown locally to stakeholders and is now ready to begin its journey spreading its messages all over the world.
Film Preview Screening in Kambia
The finished film was first shown in March 2023 in Sierra Leone at a community preview screening in Kambia, attended by all who participated in the film, the CAG and the public. A week later, the CAG travelled to Freetown to present the film at the Emergency Operations Centre of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation where the preview sparked fascinating discussions about opportunities but also significant challenges of better integrating local knowledge, including that of traditional healers, in how we think about epidemics and how we design responses to them.
The Community Advisory Group in Freetown for the film preview screening
Panel Discussion after Film Preview Screening at the Ministry of Health’s Emergency Operation Centre in Freetown
As part of our on-going Silwood Archive project, Spectacle has been hosting weekly meetings of the Silwood Video Group (SVG). Often as SVG watches archive footage together themes emerge. In the past month these have included: youth clubs, community centres, fly-tipping, and the lack of a community centre, youth facilities, green space and communal areas on the estate.
Youth facilities are lacking on Silwood Estate
The group wanted to film some locations to accompany the themes that had been coming up in the meetings. Spectacle visited the Silwood estate on Monday the 29th of December and filmed locations and activities including ongoing construction, fly-tipping, the location where the youth club bus arrives, the new community garden, and general location shots around the streets of the estate.
December streets in Silwood Estate
This footage will be added to the archive as part of the ongoing documentation of the Silwood estate for the past 20 years during the regeneration of the area.
Silwood Community Garden is just beginning
All are welcome to join our Silwood Video Group – watch original archive – help select material for publishing-get involved in filming.
In June, Spectacle began an online participatory video workshop series for a group of residents and community leaders in Greenwich.
This programme of 8 half day workshops was designed to build the skills and capacity of the diverse Greenwich communities to co-produce media. Through this training in smartphone video making, these individuals aim to produce content for and about their community of interest.
Over eight half day sessions this course is equipping the participants with core video production and editing skills. They are learning about cameras, framing, talking head interviews, filming locations, shooting action sequences, shooting to edit and editing.
Through practical exercises participants develop their technical skills and visual storytelling between sessions. The freedom of these exercises encourages participants to begin filming places and people for their projects. Topics of interest range from fashion to noise pollution to exercise and wellbeing. Some in the group are entrepreneurs running their own start ups and are excited to create content to showcase their enterprises.
Spectacle’s skill development workshops give participants a foundation in the skills required to produce engaging, good-quality video content. After only four sessions, feedback has been tremendously positive. One participant called the sessions, “eye opening.” Another spoke of how the practical exercises gave her the push and confidence to overcome her nervousness about filming.
Though the participants live locally within the same area, many do not know each other. These online sessions are also designed to encourage community cohesion and cooperation between diverse groups. Spectacle encourages resource sharing especially of equipment and skills and opens up opportunities to brainstorm about collaborations and future projects.
Spectacle’s participatory workshops are delivered live and are fully responsive to participants’ needs. These workshops assume no prior video knowledge and can be adapted to the available equipment of any group.
Participatory Workshops at Spectacle
Spectacle specialises in facilitating Participatory Video (PV) workshops aiming to give participants the tools to speak for and among themselves through video. You can read about our method here.
We approach filmmaking collaboratively and use workshops to share skills, responsibility, and authorship. Spectacle’s PV process is based on workshops in which group members build technical competence, gain confidence in their creative inputs, control the editorial process, and share ownership of the final film.
For over 40 years we have collaborated on participatory video projects with community groups, educational institutions including schools and universities, academics, researchers, NGOs, local councils, cultural institutions, and museums.
Our participatory video workshops can adapt to the nature and duration of any project. From research to outreach, from documenting to pure filmmaking strategy, working with existing groups or creating new ones, we can lead, facilitate, or just assist with your project.
If you are interested in learning more about Participatory Video consider our two week intensive course covering all aspects of our method and advice for planning your own workshops.
For the first time Spectacle is making the entire Despite TV magazine series available. This release is the first of several Video Libraries we will be putting out on Vimeo On Demand over the coming months. These libraries will use the Vimeo’s series format to curate selections from Spectacle’s back catalogue, grouping together finished films with previously unreleased archive material. We will be releasing Video Libraries on Murray Bookchin, the Exodus collective and Battersea to name a few.
Despite TV
Despite TV was an video group founded in 1982. The group operated out of the Tower Hamlets Arts Project on Whitechapel Road East London and produced video magazines that explored local issues, showcased local talent and promoted community organisations. Despite TV covered issues that have shaped the political, social and topographical landscape of London in profound ways. Despite TV documented and commented upon events such as: the dissolution of the Greater London Authority (GLC), the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) taking over the old docks to turn them into an annex of the City, and the transformation of Brick Lane from a National Front stronghold to the Bengali street we know today.
The films are not all slick productions but they make up for this with creativity and anarchic energy. Despite TV’s magazine shows were made at a time when video was far from ubiquitous and there is a feeling of excitement, a sense of discovery and possibility that underpins all the films. A typical episode moves from a report on a nurses strike to a situationist dissection of a Big Mac to a local band performing and then on to a short film about a toucan reminiscent of Chris Markers work.
The episodes in this series give insight into political events large and small, from enormous development projects to campaigns for more cycle paths to protests against Page 3. The breadth of events covered gives the series the feeling of a time capsule, giving insight into the political and cultural mood of England in the 1980’s and early ’90s.
